Flot 0.8.0-beta ##

Flot 0.8.0-beta

API changes

Support for time series has been moved into a plugin, jquery.flot.time.js.
This results in less code if time series are not used. The functionality
remains the same (plus timezone support, as described below); however, the
plugin must be included if axis.mode is set to “time”.

When the axis mode is “time”, the axis option “timezone” can be set to null,
“browser”, or a particular timezone (e.g. “America/New_York”) to control how
the dates are displayed. If null, the dates are displayed as UTC. If
“browser”, the dates are displayed in the time zone of the user’s browser.

Date/time formatting has changed and now follows a proper subset of the
standard strftime specifiers, plus one nonstandard specifier for quarters.
Additionally, if a strftime function is found in the Date object’s prototype,
it will be used instead of the built-in formatter.

Axis tick labels now use the class ‘flot-tick-label’ instead of ‘tickLabel’.
The text containers for each axis now use the classes ‘flot-[x|y]-axis’ and
‘flot-[x|y]#-axis’ instead of ‘[x|y]Axis’ and ‘[x|y]#Axis’. For compatibility
with Flot 0.7 and earlier text will continue to use the old classes as well,
but they are considered deprecated and will be removed in a future version.

In previous versions the axis ‘color’ option was used to set the color of tick
marks and their label text. It now controls the color of the axis line, which
previously could not be changed separately, and continues to act as a default
for the tick-mark color. The color of tick label text is now set either by
overriding the ‘flot-tick-label’ CSS rule or via the axis ‘font’ option.

A new plugin, jquery.flot.canvas.js, allows axis tick labels to be rendered
directly to the canvas, rather than using HTML elements. This feature can be
toggled with a simple option, making it easy to create interactive plots in the
browser using HTML, then re-render them to canvas for export as an image.

The plugin tries to remain as faithful as possible to the original HTML render,
and goes so far as to automatically extract styles from CSS, to avoid having to
provide a separate set of styles when rendering to canvas. Due to limitations
of the canvas text API, the plugin cannot reproduce certain features, including
HTML markup embedded in labels, and advanced text styles such as ‘em’ units.

The plugin requires support for canvas text, which may not be present in some
older browsers, even if they support the canvas tag itself. To use the plugin
with these browsers try using a shim such as canvas-text or FlashCanvas.

The base and overlay canvas are now using the CSS classes “flot-base” and
“flot-overlay” to prevent accidental clashes (issue 540).

In addition to “left” and “center”, bars now recognize “right” as an
alignment option. (patch by Michael Mayer, issue 520)

Switched from toFixed to a much faster default tickFormatter. (patch by
Clemens Stolle)

Added to a more helpful error when using a time-mode axis without including
the flot.time plugin. (patch by Yael Elmatad)

Added a legend “sorted” option to control sorting of legend entries
independent of their series order. (patch by Tom Cleaveland)

Added a series “highlightColor” option to control the color of the
translucent overlay that identifies the dataset when the mouse hovers over
it. (patch by Eric Wendelin and Nate Abele, issues 168 and 299)

Added a plugin jquery.flot.errorbars, with an accompanying example, that
adds the ability to plot error bars, commonly used in many kinds of
statistical data visualizations. (patch by Rui Pereira, issue 215)

Added support for high pixel density (retina) displays, resulting in much
crisper charts on such devices. (patch by Olivier Guerriat, additional
fixes by Julien Thomas, maimairel, and Lau Bech Lauritzen)

Added the ability to control pie shadow position and alpha via a new pie
‘shadow’ option. (patch by Julien Thomas, pull request #78)

Added the ability to set width and color for individual sides of the grid.
(patch by Ara Anjargolian, additional fixes by Karl Swedberg, pull requests #855
and #880)

The selection plugin’s getSelection now returns null when the selection
has been cleared. (patch by Nick Campbell, pull request #852)

Added a new option called ‘zero’ to bars and filled lines series, to control
whether the y-axis minimum is scaled to fit the data or set to zero.
(patch by David Schnur, issues #316, #529, and #856, pull request #911)

The plot function is now also a jQuery chainable property.
(patch by David Schnur, issues #734 and #816, pull request #953)

When only a single pie slice is beneath the combine threshold it is no longer
replaced by an ‘other’ slice. (suggested by Devin Bayer, issue #638)

Added lineJoin and minSize options to the selection plugin to control the
corner style and minimum size of the selection, respectively.
(patch by Ruth Linehan, pull request #963)

Fixed an error when using the navigate plugin with jQuery 1.9.x or later.
(reported by Paolo Valleri, issue #964)

Flot 0.7

API changes

Multiple axes support. Code using dual axes should be changed from using
x2axis/y2axis in the options to using an array (although backwards-
compatibility hooks are in place). For instance,

{xaxis:{...},x2axis:{...},yaxis:{...},y2axis:{...}}

becomes

{xaxes:[{...},{...}],yaxes:[{...},{...}]}

Note that if you’re just using one axis, continue to use the xaxis/yaxis
directly (it now sets the default settings for the arrays). Plugins touching
the axes must be ported to take the extra axes into account, check the source
to see some examples.

A related change is that the visibility of axes is now auto-detected. So if
you were relying on an axis to show up even without any data in the chart, you
now need to set the axis “show” option explicitly.

“tickColor” on the grid options is now deprecated in favour of a corresponding
option on the axes, so:

{grid:{tickColor:"#000"}}

becomes

{xaxis:{tickColor:"#000"},yaxis:{tickColor:"#000"}}

But if you just configure a base color Flot will now autogenerate a tick color
by adding transparency. Backwards-compatibility hooks are in place.

Final note: now that IE 9 is coming out with canvas support, you may want to
adapt the excanvas include to skip loading it in IE 9 (the examples have been
adapted thanks to Ryley Breiddal). An alternative to excanvas using Flash has
also surfaced, if your graphs are slow in IE, you may want to give it a spin:

http://code.google.com/p/flashcanvas/

Changes

Support for specifying a bottom for each point for line charts when filling
them, this means that an arbitrary bottom can be used instead of just the x
axis. (based on patches patiently provided by Roman V. Prikhodchenko)

New fillbetween plugin that can compute a bottom for a series from another
series, useful for filling areas between lines.

See new example percentiles.html for a use case.

More predictable handling of gaps for the stacking plugin, now all
undefined ranges are skipped.

Stacking plugin can stack horizontal bar charts.

Navigate plugin now redraws the plot while panning instead of only after
the fact. (raised by lastthemy, issue 235)

Can be disabled by setting the pan.frameRate option to null.

Date formatter now accepts %0m and %0d to get a zero-padded month or day.
(issue raised by Maximillian Dornseif)

Revamped internals to support an unlimited number of axes, not just dual.
(sponsored by Flight Data Services, www.flightdataservices.com)

New setting on axes, “tickLength”, to control the size of ticks or turn
them off without turning off the labels.

Axis labels are now put in container divs with classes, for instance labels
in the x axes can be reached via “.xAxis .tickLabel”.

Support for setting the color of an axis. (sponsored by Flight Data
Services, www.flightdataservices.com)

Tick color is now auto-generated as the base color with some transparency,
unless you override it.

Support for aligning ticks in the axes with “alignTicksWithAxis” to ensure
that they appear next to each other rather than in between, at the expense
of possibly awkward tick steps. (sponsored by Flight Data Services,
www.flightdataservices.com)

Support for customizing the point type through a callback when plotting
points and new symbol plugin with some predefined point types. (sponsored
by Utility Data Corporation)

This prevents a memory leak in Chrome and hopefully makes replotting faster
for those who are using $.plot instead of .setData()/.draw(). Also update
jQuery to 1.5.1 to prevent IE leaks fixed in jQuery.

New real-time line chart example.

New hooks: drawSeries, shutdown.

Bug fixes

Fixed problem with findNearbyItem and bars on top of each other. (reported
by ragingchikn, issue 242)

Fixed problem with ticks and the border. (based on patch from
ultimatehustler69, issue 236)

Fixed problem with plugins adding options to the series objects.

Fixed a problem introduced in 0.6 with specifying a gradient with:

{brightness: x, opacity: y }

Don’t use $.browser.msie, check for getContext on the created canvas element
instead and try to use excanvas if it’s not found.

Fixes IE 9 compatibility.

highlight(s, index) was looking up the point in the original s.data instead
of in the computed datapoints array, which breaks with plugins that modify
the datapoints, such as the stacking plugin. (reported by curlypaul924,
issue 316)

More robust handling of axis from data passed in from getData(). (reported)
by Morgan)

Fix bug in picking items when transform/inverseTransform is in use
(reported by Ofri Raviv, and patches and analysis by Jan and Tom
Paton, issue 334 and 467).

Fix problem with unaligned ticks and hover/click events caused by
padding on the placeholder by hardcoding the placeholder padding to
0 (reported by adityadineshsaxena, Matt Sommer, Daniel Atos and some
other people, issue 301).

Flot 0.6

API changes

Selection support has been moved to a plugin. Thus if you’re passing
selection: { mode: something }, you MUST include the file
jquery.flot.selection.js after jquery.flot.js. This reduces the size of
base Flot and makes it easier to customize the selection as well as
improving code clarity. The change is based on a patch from andershol.

In the global options specified in the $.plot command, “lines”, “points”,
“bars” and “shadowSize” have been moved to a sub-object called “series”:

$.plot(placeholder,data,{lines:{show:true}})

should be changed to

$.plot(placeholder,data,{series:{lines:{show:true}}})

All future series-specific options will go into this sub-object to
simplify plugin writing. Backward-compatibility code is in place, so
old code should not break.

“plothover” no longer provides the original data point, but instead a
normalized one, since there may be no corresponding original point.

Due to a bug in previous versions of jQuery, you now need at least
jQuery 1.2.6. But if you can, try jQuery 1.3.2 as it got some improvements
in event handling speed.

Changes

Added support for disabling interactivity for specific data series.
(request from Ronald Schouten and Steve Upton)

Flot now calls $() on the placeholder and optional legend container passed
in so you can specify DOM elements or CSS expressions to make it easier to
use Flot with libraries like Prototype or Mootools or through raw JSON from
Ajax responses.

A new “plotselecting” event is now emitted while the user is making a
selection.

The “plothover” event is now emitted immediately instead of at most 10
times per second, you’ll have to put in a setTimeout yourself if you’re
doing something really expensive on this event.

The built-in date formatter can now be accessed as $.plot.formatDate(…)
(suggestion by Matt Manela) and even replaced.

Added support for gradient backgrounds for the grid. (based on patch from
Amaury Chamayou, issue 90)

The “setting options” example provides a demonstration.

Gradient bars. (suggestion by stefpet)

Added a “plotunselected” event which is triggered when the selection is
removed, see “selection” example. (suggestion by Meda Ugo)

The option legend.margin can now specify horizontal and vertical margins
independently. (suggestion by someone who’s annoyed)

Data passed into Flot is now copied to a new canonical format to enable
further processing before it hits the drawing routines. As a side-effect,
this should make Flot more robust in the face of bad data. (issue 112)

Step-wise charting: line charts have a new option “steps” that when set to
true connects the points with horizontal/vertical steps instead of diagonal
lines.

The legend labelFormatter now passes the series in addition to just the
label. (suggestion by Vincent Lemeltier)

Horizontal bars (based on patch by Jason LeBrun).

Support for partial bars by specifying a third coordinate, i.e. they don’t
have to start from the axis. This can be used to make stacked bars.

New option to disable the (grid.show).

Added pointOffset method for converting a point in data space to an offset
within the placeholder.

Plugin system: register an init method in the $.flot.plugins array to get
started, see PLUGINS.txt for details on how to write plugins (it’s easy).
There are also some extra methods to enable access to internal state.

Hooks: you can register functions that are called while Flot is crunching
the data and doing the plot. This can be used to modify Flot without
changing the source, useful for writing plugins. Some hooks are defined,
more are likely to come.

Threshold plugin: you can set a threshold and a color, and the data points
below that threshold will then get the color. Useful for marking data
below 0, for instance.

Stack plugin: you can specify a stack key for each series to have them
summed. This is useful for drawing additive/cumulative graphs with bars and
(currently unfilled) lines.

Crosshairs plugin: trace the mouse position on the axes, enable with
crosshair: { mode: “x”} (see the new tracking example for a use).

The color parsing code in Flot has been cleaned up and split out so it’s
now available as a separate jQuery plugin. It’s included inline in the Flot
source to make dependency managing easier. This also makes it really easy
to use the color helpers in Flot plugins.

Bug fixes

Fix auto-adjustment code when setting min to 0 for an axis where the
dataset is completely flat on that axis. (report by chovy)

Fixed a bug with passing in data from getData to setData when the secondary
axes are used. (reported by nperelman, issue 65)

Fixed so that it is possible to turn lines off when no other chart type is
shown (based on problem reported by Glenn Vanderburg), and fixed so that
setting lineWidth to 0 also hides the shadow. (based on problem reported by
Sergio Nunes)

Updated mousemove position expression to the latest from jQuery. (reported
by meyuchas)

Use CSS borders instead of background in legend. (issues 25 and 45)

Explicitly convert axis min/max to numbers.

Fixed a bug with drawing marking lines with different colors. (reported by
Khurram)

Fixed a bug with returning y2 values in the selection event. (fix by
exists, issue 75)

Only set position relative on placeholder if it hasn’t already a position
different from static. (reported by kyberneticist, issue 95)

Make the grid border act similarly to a regular CSS border, i.e. prevent
it from overlapping the plot itself. This also fixes a problem with anti-
aliasing when the width is 1 pixel. (reported by Anthony Ettinger)

Imported version 3 of excanvas and fixed two issues with the newer version.
Hopefully, this will make Flot work with IE8. (nudge by Fabien Menager,
further analysis by Booink, issue 133)

Changed the shadow code for lines to hopefully look a bit better with
vertical lines.

Made the heuristic for determining how many ticks to aim for a bit smarter.

Fix for uneven axis margins (report and patch by Paul Kienzle) and snapping
to ticks. (report and patch by lifthrasiir)

Fixed bug with slicing in findNearbyItems. (patch by zollman)

Make heuristic for x axis label widths more dynamic. (patch by
rickinhethuis)

Make sure points on top take precedence when finding nearby points when
hovering. (reported by didroe, issue 224)

Flot 0.5

Timestamps are now in UTC. Also “selected” event -> becomes “plotselected”
with new data, the parameters for setSelection are now different (but
backwards compatibility hooks are in place), coloredAreas becomes markings
with a new interface (but backwards compatibility hooks are in place).

API changes

Timestamps in time mode are now displayed according to UTC instead of the time
zone of the visitor. This affects the way the timestamps should be input;
you’ll probably have to offset the timestamps according to your local time
zone. It also affects any custom date handling code (which basically now
should use the equivalent UTC date mehods, e.g. .setUTCMonth() instead of
.setMonth().

Markings, previously coloredAreas, are now specified as ranges on the axes,
like { xaxis: { from: 0, to: 10 }}. Furthermore with markings you can
now draw horizontal/vertical lines by setting from and to to the same
coordinate. (idea from line support patch by by Ryan Funduk)

Interactivity: added a new “plothover” event and this and the “plotclick”
event now returns the closest data item (based on patch by /david, patch by
Mark Byers for bar support). See the revamped “interacting with the data”
example for some hints on what you can do.

Highlighting: you can now highlight points and datapoints are autohighlighted
when you hover over them (if hovering is turned on).

Support for dual axis has been added (based on patch by someone who’s annoyed
and /david). For each data series you can specify which axes it belongs to,
and there are two more axes, x2axis and y2axis, to customize. This affects the
“selected” event which has been renamed to “plotselected” and spews out
{ xaxis: { from: -10, to: 20 } ... }, setSelection in which the
parameters are on a new form (backwards compatible hooks are in place so old
code shouldn’t break) and markings (formerly coloredAreas).

Changes

Added support for specifying the size of tick labels (axis.labelWidth,
axis.labelHeight). Useful for specifying a max label size to keep multiple
plots aligned.

The “fill” option can now be a number that specifies the opacity of the
fill.

You can now specify a coordinate as null (like [2, null]) and Flot will
take the other coordinate into account when scaling the axes. (based on
patch by joebno)

New option for bars “align”. Set it to “center” to center the bars on the
value they represent.

setSelection now takes a second parameter which you can use to prevent the
method from firing the “plotselected” handler.

Improved the handling of axis auto-scaling with bars.

Bug fixes

Fixed a bug in calculating spacing around the plot. (reported by
timothytoe)

Fixed a bug in finding max values for all-negative data sets.

Prevent the possibility of eternal looping in tick calculations.

Fixed a bug when borderWidth is set to 0. (reported by Rob/sanchothefat)

Using the “container” option in legend now overwrites the container element
instead of just appending to it, fixing the infinite legend bug. (reported
by several people, fix by Brad Dewey)

Flot 0.4

API changes

Deprecated axis.noTicks in favor of just specifying the number as axis.ticks.
So xaxis: { noTicks: 10 } becomes xaxis: { ticks: 10 }.

Time series support. Specify axis.mode: “time”, put in Javascript timestamps
as data, and Flot will automatically spit out sensible ticks. Take a look at
the two new examples. The format can be customized with axis.timeformat and
axis.monthNames, or if that fails with axis.tickFormatter.

More members on the plot object (report by Chris Davies and others).
“getData” for inspecting the assigned settings on data series (e.g. color) and
“setData”, “setupGrid” and “draw” for updating the contents without a total
replot.

The default number of ticks to aim for is now dependent on the size of the
plot in pixels. Support for customizing tick interval sizes directly with
axis.minTickSize and axis.tickSize.

Cleaned up the automatic axis scaling algorithm and fixed how it interacts
with ticks. Also fixed a couple of tick-related corner case bugs (one reported
by mainstreetmark, another reported by timothytoe).

The option axis.tickFormatter now takes a function with two parameters, the
second parameter is an optional object with information about the axis. It has
min, max, tickDecimals, tickSize.

Changes

Added support for segmented lines. (based on patch from Michael MacDonald)

Added support for ignoring null and bad values. (suggestion from Nick
Konidaris and joshwaihi)

Added support for changing the border width. (thanks to joebno and safoo)

Bug fixes

Fixed erratic behaviour when interacting with the plot with IE 7. (reported
by Lau Bech Lauritzen).

Prevent IE/Safari text selection when selecting stuff on the canvas.

Flot 0.3

This is mostly a quick-fix release because jquery.js wasn’t included in the
previous zip/tarball.

Changes

Include jquery.js in the zip/tarball.

Support clicking on the plot. Turn it on with grid: { clickable: true },
then you get a “plotclick” event on the graph placeholder with the position
in units of the plot.

Bug fixes

Fixed a bug in dealing with data where min = max. (thanks to Michael
Messinides)

Flot 0.2

The API should now be fully documented.

API changes

Moved labelMargin option to grid from x/yaxis.

Changes

Added support for putting a background behind the default legend. The
default is the partly transparent background color. Added backgroundColor
and backgroundOpacity to the legend options to control this.

The ticks options can now be a callback function that takes one parameter,
an object with the attributes min and max. The function should return a
ticks array.

Added labelFormatter option in legend, useful for turning the legend
labels into links.